


just his roommate

by stilllovers



Category: Bastille (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Kyle & Dan are the same age, M/M, Phil Lester makes a cameo if you wanted to know that, Will is barely in it he's like mentioned, disclaimer: i haven't been to uni i don't know what its like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-07
Updated: 2016-10-07
Packaged: 2018-08-20 01:03:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8230837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stilllovers/pseuds/stilllovers
Summary: Dan doesn't want a roommate but he ends up with one ridiculously adorable Kyle Jonathan Simmons.





	

**Author's Note:**

> dont share with the band, nothing is real, etc etc. ily all

Even though he applied for a single room, Dan was disappointed to find he’s been assigned a room, with a roommate, in his _last choice of halls_. There are worse situations to be in, he supposes, and he’s grateful to even be _going_ to Leeds- he’s thanked luck, the stars, and any god that might exist for the place he finally got in clearing. But still. This Kyle Jonathan Simmons fellow better not be a druggie or the kind to bring a girl back to their bedroom every other night. He’s probably both of those things and more, actually.

People are milling about in the corridor - someone’s brought their parents which is slightly adorable – and having the awkward conversation you always do when you first meet the person you’re going to be sharing a space of approximately 5 metres squared with for the next _nine months_. He wonders if he should just straight up Sherlock it out and tell Kyle Jonathan Simmons a list of his flaws. Although going through all of them, one by one, would likely take too long. Kyle Jonathan Simmons would get bored.

His room – their room - is the first one by the entrance. He isn’t sure how he feels about that just yet, but the windows are pretty big since it’s on the corner. Walking into the room, it’s evident that Kyle hasn’t arrived yet- both beds and desks are bare and there’s no sign that anyone has entered this room other than a cleaner or something since last June. So he gets first pick, he notes with a small smile. It’s the little joys in life, he thinks, dragging his suitcase to the bed by the wall and the window. He’s just considering going to socialise or going to go find his school friend Sophie when there’s a low “Hello,” from behind him.

Dan whips around. The source of the hello, who he assumes is Kyle, looks a little bit like a fourteen-year-old with his odd, fringed, haircut, but then, Dan’s hair isn’t really better. He’s tall, probably taller than him, dark-haired and dark-eyed but lanky and pale. His t-shirt has like, fifteen kittens on it, which Dan notes with slight amusement.

“Hey,” Dan says, with what he hopes is a welcoming smile. He steps forward and shakes Possibly-Kyle’s hand. “I’m Dan. You’re Kyle, I assume?”

Possibly-Kyle nods. “Yeah. We’re gonna be roommates, then?”

Dan puts his hands in his pockets and surveys Kyle. “Apparently, mate. I’ve chosen a bed, sorry.”

“Nah, I’m not bothered, I’m fine, a bed’s a bed, you know, they’re all equally shitty, aren’t they, I mean, it’s uni, not a hotel.” He speaks quickly, tripping over his own words in a rush to finish his sentence. Dan smiles – it’s an endearing quality, somehow.

“Yeah, I guess. So what’re you studying?”

“Media. It’s soft, I know, I’ve been told about fifty times. You?”

Dan shakes his head. “Media’s great. I’m doing English.”

“Oh.” Kyle replies, with a tone that Dan can’t quite place. “You met that lad across the hall, then?”

“Nah, I just arrived.”

Kyle gets excited and begins to bounce on his toes. “His name’s Phil, he’s doing English too, he’s propped his door open with a packet of Haribo, so if you want some, we should go. And maybe he’ll give me some more, I don’t know, he really wants to be friends with everyone.”

“I think I’ll actually go say hi to everyone, you know. It’s nice.”

“I’ll come with you- or not, I mean…” Kyle hesitates.

Dan shrugs. “Why not?”

Kyle seems delighted at his nonchalant agreement and together, they leave the room.

**

Aoife’s nineteenth isn’t an official social, but she invited the whole year, so it essentially turns into the equivalent of the unofficial end to two weeks of socialising. Dan’s brain practically seizes up at the thought of so many people and so much social interaction but a series of explicit texts from Sophie tell him that he’d _better be at every social event unless you want literally no fucking friends, Smith._ Dan’s still unsure, but Kyle – excitable, cute, Kyle – is going and so is _literally_ every single other person in existence so he may as well go.

Dan considers the fact that developing an embarrassingly rapid interest in your probably straight roommate probably isn’t the best idea, but he couldn’t really help it. Kyle, for whatever reason, had an air about him that made Dan slightly hot and bothered and very giggly and smiling, something which hadn’t been the easiest thing to come by over the past few years. There’s also the matter of having to come out to _so many new people_ and the idea makes him sick to the stomach because even though most people are perfectly fine with gay people there is always, always, going to be at least one bigoted _twat_ who can’t seem to move out of the seventeenth century.

It’s a while into the party, after Dan gets tired of drifting between conversations that people are already having with other people, when Dan spots Kyle. He’d been absent from his room since early that morning – in fact, he seemed to do little in their room other than sleep. It doesn’t bother Dan, really, but he feels as though he should be seeing more of Kyle if they were going to end up as friends at least. So when Dan spots him, he strides up with purpose.

“Hello,” Dan says. “What’re you drinking?” He asks with a slight frown, noting the bright colour of Kyle’s drink, but the odd lighting makes it difficult to really tell what it is.

“Some dodgy cocktail or the other. Not sure, I just picked it up because I wanted something to drink. You want some?” Kyle offers.

“I think I’ll pass, mate.”

“Shame, ‘cos it tastes fucking mad. I’ve got no idea what they put in these.”

“Probably just a lot of alcohol, I’ll guess,” Dan laughs.

They make conversation for a while, about movies and TV and music – they seem to share a taste in music but for whatever reason Kyle’s a little too into Disney.

“What? There’s nothing wrong with Disney, I fucking love Disney, it’s great,” he says.

Dan agrees. “No, Disney’s wicked, I agree, but like, I don’t know, I just don’t expect that as an answer when I ask about movies.”

“Why not?”

And Dan doesn’t really have an answer other than that they’re not really what you expect if you said “Name a movie!”, which sparks a conversation on what makes a movie a movie.

“Damn,” Kyle mutters after a while, his eyes focused somewhere behind Dan.

“Yeah?” Dan asks, mishearing.

“Who’s that chick over there?”

Dan turns around because he has to, after a comment like that, and he tries to ignore the angry red blush creeping up his neck. Why he’s blushing, he isn’t sure. But he is, and he doesn’t like it.

He pretends to be interested.

“Which?”

“That one, the blonde standing next to Brianna.”

“Yeah, she’s fairly fit, isn’t she?”

“She’s a fucking model, that’s what she is. D’you think I can go up and talk to her?”

Dan couldn’t care less about Kyle and his heterosexual advances. So he gives an unhelpful answer and pretends to have spotted Sophie in the crowd.

Face blushing red, he tries to figure out why he ever thought that liking Kyle was a good idea and why he thought that anything would work out in his favour, ever. Better to be the pessimist than to be incessantly disappointed by what life has to offer, he concludes. How is being an optimist helpful at all? is what he muses as he takes a drink from a tray nearby. He’s angry but he isn’t sure why; there’s no reason for him to be, Kyle’s just his roommate and they’ve known each other for a grand total of nine days. He’s being completely irrational.

 _Just his roommate_ is the phrase echoing in his head when some guy comes over and starts to, painfully obviously, flirt with him.

 _Just his roommate_ is the thought he has that convinces him to kiss this guy back later on in the night.

 _Just his roommate_ is the reminder he gives himself when he hesitates before drunkenly allowing this guy to tug his shirt off over his head.

Dan was being delusional, that’s all, it was a pointless, short, crush, and Kyle Jonathan Simmons is _just his roommate_.

***

“Is it true then?” Kyle asks from his bed a few days later while Dan is getting ready to go to lectures, packing his bag.

Dan pauses. “Is what true?”

“That you pulled Will Farquarson in the year above?”

 _Panic_.

Dan clenches his fist tight around the strap of his bag. He waits before replying with a single word:

“Yes.”

There’s a short silence.

“Oh,” Kyle says. “Okay then.”

“Why? How’d you know?” Dan’s knuckles are whitening.

“News travels, I guess. Will is probably one of the best known people in the year above, ‘because he rides a motorcycle to uni and all. He does media too and he has the same tutor as me. People were talking.”

His heart is starting to race now and he feels sick to the stomach because oh _god_ he’d hoped that he’d be able to come out to people in a slightly different manner to the last time, when in sixth form someone caught him with his ex in a photocopying room. Having to pretend that Ryan’s hands hadn’t just been down his pants was a little difficult to say the least. And the sneers, and the stares, and the giggles – He feels ill just thinking about it.

“What –” he swallows. “What were they saying?”

“Nothing bad, just that Will in the year above slept with some Literature fresher called Dan who he said was deathly gorgeous. I wondered if it was you.”

Dan’s shoulders, which he hadn’t noticed were tense, relax slightly at Kyle’s conclusion. “So you think that I’m deathly gorgeous?”

Kyle laughs but there’s discomfort behind it and Dan regrets the joke immediately because as far as he’s aware, Kyle’s straight and in his experience straight boys don’t take well to jokes about their sexuality. He feels guilty assuming he’s straight because he could just as easily be bi or something else completely but, with the memory of Aoife’s birthday fresh in his mind, he resolves that assuming Kyle is straight is, for Dan, the least painful option.

“You’re a Literature fresher and you’re called Dan. What I _do_ think is that you’re going to be late for your nine am start,” is what Kyle says instead, turning around in bed. “I’m going back to sleep. Good night.”

“Fuck you,” Dan murmurs with a laugh. He hauls his bag onto his shoulder and rolls his eyes at Kyle, but he’s shaken by the way news travels around here, and he makes a conscious effort to be far, far more careful the next time someone convinces him to go to a party.

..

It’s mid-January, which is terrible because of three things:

  * Christmas is over
  * It’s fucking freezing
  * Their first exams



Dan could not be more done with life than now, because he can’t taste his food because of his blocked nose, he can’t brush his teeth without having to stop to breathe through his mouth, and he can’t concentrate on studying which is stressing him out. He’s sick, and _not_ in the good way, as Kyle joked when he lay, practically _dying_ , in bed. Dan had thrown his tissue box at him and, of course, missed, which only made Kyle laugh even more.

Kyle’s cute and Dan (…still, much to his own disdain, because he really needs to get himself together) has a massive crush on him but that doesn’t mean he can’t be a little bit annoying sometimes. Like when Dan came home after falling asleep in the library (He can’t help it, it’s quiet and warm! And it’s hardly his fault no one woke him up.) and Kyle was accompanied by a - well, a late night visitor. Dan kept his head down and tried not to be conspicuous as he got into bed, and, surprisingly, neither of them seemed to have noticed. But then, Kyle couldn’t remember the girl’s name the next day, and Dan had to try his very best to mask his silent joy at that fact.

Since then, Kyle hasn’t had any visitors. Dan has made a visit or two to Will-with-the-leather-jacket-and-the-motorcycle’s flat if he ever texted him but he hasn’t for a few months. Dan wonders, a little miserable at the lack of attention he’s receiving from Will, whether he’s got himself a proper boyfriend and he’s done taking out his sexual frustration on an eighteen-year-old with ridiculous hair. Dan has to defend his late night escapades to Will’s to Sophie, who can’t understand that he’s a little infatuated with Kyle and yet still had something going on with this Will character. It’s not a relationship, he says, they just slept together like _twice_ , and it’s not like he could ever date Kyle, and the whole thing is going to blow over in a few weeks anyway and they’ll both be wondering what Dan ever saw in him.

He has been saying that since October, though, and it has been a good four months of furiously trying to hide his blushed cheeks when he sees Kyle shirtless and ignore the butterflies in his stomach whenever he laughs.

Dan is incredibly annoyed at Kyle’s lack of studying, though. Like, it’s not his business, but he’s _paying_ for this education and Dan didn’t know that Kyle also had exams until three am on the morning of the exam when Kyle was bouncing up and down in his chair after one too many Redbulls and reading a book aloud to himself. When Dan mentions it at the end of the week after their last exam, Kyle just shrugs.

“They’re only 3% of your eventual degree. If I end up failing then like, I have three more years’ worth of exams to make it up.”

Dan is indignant. “But, don’t you _want_ to work hard, I mean, you’re finally at university pursuing something you wanted to do and you worked really hard to get in here, so isn’t not studying or caring a waste of time and effort? No offence.”

Kyle laughs and pulls the beanie Dan’s wearing over his face. “You are a _giant_ nerd; you do know that?”

“Hey!” he protests.

Kyle continues to laugh as Dan glares at him.

“You were gonna come to dinner with me and Hannah, yeah?”

“Um, well, I still can’t really taste anything, but sure, is that now?”

“She said at eight, let me check –” Kyle pulls out his phone then groans. “She can’t make it, what’s up with that?”

Dan shrugs and ignores his heart rate increasing as he suggests, “We could go anyway? Just you and me. If you want, I mean, I get it if you don’t want to.”

Kyle jumps up. “You’re hilarious. Of course I want to. Who else can I trust to not judge me for taking advantage of the Tuesdays offer on pizza?”

“We’re students,” Dan notes while mentally berating his insides for turning inside out and the right way around and then back again, because obviously this isn’t a date or anything, they’re just two friends, just a couple of mates, going out, because there’s food. “Everyone expects us to take advantage of free stuff.”

“Not everyone expects us to be able to eat most of two pizzas,” Kyle counters.

 Dan laughs. “I thought you said you could eat a _whole_ two.”

“Is that a challenge? Grab your stuff, you little cunt, you’re going to watch me eat two pizzas.”

..

After Dan discovering the previous night over dinner that Kyle had never seen Twin Peaks (“I don't know why, I guess I just never- oh, would you stop looking at me like that, for Christ's sake, Dan.”) the two of them are sat down together on the floor watching it and completing Kyle's life for him.

They're about half an hour into the first episode when Kyle's phone goes off.

“It's on the bed right behind you, can you see who it is?”

Dan grumbles something about being sick (even though he has recovered immensely today, and it was only a cold in the first place) but reaches behind him and begins to read aloud.

“It’s Hannah. She says KYLE!! How w-” Dan's heart catches in his throat. “Oh.”

“What?” Kyle leans over Dan to read the text and turns a bright shade of pink before locking the screen and snatching it out of Dan's hand.

“She's an idiot, she doesn't know what she's talking about, she likes to joke that I - she thinks that she's really funny, you know, girls like to be silly sometimes, right?”

Dan just sniffs then murmurs a quiet assent before pressing play again, trying to ignore his heart doing ninety miles an hour at the thought, the hope, the idea that Kyle might-

Well, he just said he doesn't.

They watch a couple more minutes before Kyle says, very quietly-

“Dan.”

“Kyle.”

“I mean, if you want last night to have been a date, then it can, you know.”

Oh, Dan thinks, eyes widening. Oh. _Oh_.

“Would you?” he asks quietly.

Kyle doesn't meet his eyes. “I wouldn't mind it.”

“Well, then yeah, I do want that. I want it quite a bit, actually.”

“Right. Okay.”

“Okay.”

They settle down quietly and Dan is suddenly acutely aware of every square millimetre of his body that's in contact with Kyle's. They seem to be touching an awful lot, really, touching thighs and knees and sides and arms. He tries something. He puts his head on Kyle's shoulder and underneath him feels muscles tense for a second then relax completely, and, looking up, sees a shy smile tugging at the corners of Kyle's mouth.

“Kyle?”

“Yeah?” He replies without looking away from the screen.

“I thought you were straight.”

There's a short pause.

“No,” is his only answer.

“Okay,” Dan says, leaning back. “Okay.”

“Cool,” Kyle says, but his voice cracks and Dan chuckles slightly then mocks his tone of voice.

“Co-ol,” he repeats. 

“Shut up, Smith,” Kyle warns, shoving Dan off. “Your cold makes you sound like a fucking goose.”

At that, Dan laughs, coughs, then laughs even more, doubling over with the apparent hilarity of it. It's not even that funny, but Dan is just a little bit giddy right now because _Kyle wants to date him, and Kyle wants him too, and he's not sad and alone in his gayness_.

Kyle laughs a little too and Dan, looking up at him, feels a familiar flutter in his stomach. His eyes drift down to the curve of Kyle's smiling lips and subconsciously he licks his own.

“Kyle,” he says, barely audible.

The laughter stops and Dan can hear them both breathing a little too loudly and a little too shakily.

His eyes flicker from Kyle's eyes to his lips repeatedly.

“Can I - I mean; do you think I could – I’m sick, but like -”

“Go ahead,” Kyle offers tentatively.

And Dan, before he's distracted by the pace of his heart and the voice in his head telling him _everything will go wrong, do you want to make him sick too, you selfish, selfish creature_ , leans in and gently, oh so very, very gently, presses a kiss to Kyle's lips.

Dan smiles and pulls away.

“That was nice,” Kyle breathes. “Never - never kissed a guy before.”

“Probably shouldn’t –” Dan sniffs. “Probably shouldn’t do it again, I’m going to make you sick.”

“I don’t mind,” Kyle says. “I mean, even if you’re sick, I would still want you to kiss me again.”

The second time it's longer, and Dan's smiling into it and Kyle's fingers curl in Dan's hair which feels nice, so nice that when he tightens his grip Dan hums a little with satisfaction.

Kyle is pulling him closer when Dan realises something and abruptly breaks the kiss.

“Disrespect,” is what he mutters.

“What?” Kyle is baffled.

“It's a disrespect to Twin Peaks to have it play in the background. I need to turn it off,” Dan explains, leaning forward.

Kyle groans loudly, close to yelling. “Dan Smith, you absolute twat! Fuck the bloody show!”

Dan mutters that he probably would if it was a person.

“Dan!” Kyle cries, exasperated.

“What?!” Dan laughs.

“You're such a nerd!”

Dan shrugs. “Isn't that a good thing?”

“Dan!” But he's laughing this time, and Dan wants nothing more than to kiss the lips that laugh.

“Kyle!” Dan repeats, in a similar tone, shuffling back so he's right next to Kyle. Dan wants to kiss him again, but he doesn't know if-

Oh.

Kyle's kissing him now, and Dan feels warm from his head to his toes because first time it was him but now it's Kyle and wow. Just, wow. This is nice. This is an enjoyable thing. This is something he could get behind.

Dan has to pull away to laugh at how that sounds just slightly wrong.

Kyle shakes his head. “Nerd.”

And Dan can't help but laugh again.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> aah i hope you enjoyed reading this! i never have liked people reading my writing but the universe needs more dyle so here i am putting my crappy gay fanfic on the internet. please tell me what you thought & how i could improve bc this is probably really choppy and weird idk bye


End file.
